KDE Blogs 

Today I experienced two moments of bewilderment, the second one mixed with dismay. At first, when I googled for something unrelated, on one of the returns I saw a forum post where someone said "Icaza himself says that OOXML is superb". Well, first I was amazed, then I shrugged, and wrote it off as a troll, and continued with my other tasks. Two hours later I remembered again. Read More

KVocTrain is dead. Welcome Parley! You might already have noticed when synching kde-edu yesterday or today that the KVocTrain folder has gone and been replaced by Parley. And not only the name has changed. I was able to close quite a few bugs while rewriting the better part of the old KVocTrain. One bug that was very annoying was closed yesterday by simply enhancing the gui a little. It is a feature that Jeremy implemented in our rewrite of the kvtml (Parleys file format) lib. In the old KVocTrain one could have three languages (see screenshots). Let's say German-English-French. Read More

One of the nice aspects of being a software developer is that sometimes users come up with using your software in creative ways you never have thought of. They discover surprise features. I particularly like these because they show that you have great users and they often also are a sign that you took some right design decisions. Read More

I've never [image:2980 align="left" size="preview" hspace=4 vspace=2 border=0 class="showonplanet"] seen Xinerama combined with Compiz/Beryl/XGL (or AIGLX) in action. This morning, when checking out a printing-related blog, I stumbled upon a little YouTube video showing exactly that. It does look amazing indeed. Read More

I don't know about you, but there's this hugely annoying behaviour of QDockWidgets. Since Krita 2 uses them, I tend to run into it a lot. The symptoms are simple: if you have a floating dock widget and Krita loses focus, the dock widget gets hidden. Read More

Here is a recent announcement from the OpenPrinting workgroup, hosted by the Linux Foundation. It didn't receive any widespread publication, AFAICS. But it deserves to:   OpenPrinting/LinuxFoundation: "We are Hiring Students/Interns for Implementing the PDF Printing Workflow" Posted by: Till Kamppeter Date: August 29, 2007 09:08AM Read More

it took me nearly 2 months to go through 7 years of code. and I came to the sad reality that only 5% of it is reusable and interesting even the embedded firewall product is not that interesting anymore since it's based on an ancient technology (namely freebsd 4.x) so I decided to ditch it too, no more new version and no support for it since I don't have the setup for doing it. What I will do is to take the knowledge and some of the cool concept I got while designing it and reimplement them using something more modern, here my goal is to not let die the best thing (even if sometime it was a pain in the ass) I managed to do in the past 7 years. Read More

Who am I? Good question, next question please. But seriously, my name is Frederik Gladhorn and this is my first post on the planet, if everything goes well :) I have started taking over KVocTrain some time ago. KVT had some rough edges and still does. "Bug 108568: kvoctrain interface is very confusing, can't figure out a thing" Is by far my favorite. Closing it will almost make me sad... Edu people probably know me by now from bugging them on IRC. I have been working with Jeremy Whiting to get the keduvocdocument lib into shape, letting him do most of the work actually. The result is quite satisfactory, as KAnagram, KHangman, KWordQuiz and KVocTrain now have a XML file format that is actually readable for humans too. After that was done, I used the chainsaw (as Pino) noted to go through the KVT code the last weeks or so. I'm quite satisfied with a much cleaner and easier to use interface. Now KVocTrain really longs for a nice shiny new Oxygen icon. Usability suggestions are welcome as well :) Another thing to quickstart people using the program is a wizard which also got redone last week. The obligatory screenshot of the new language selection dialog: This will probably only make people happy who know the old way of setting up languages in KVT... it makes me happy ;) Frederik

Will it be a GargleBlaster? (the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick) Well maybe not. And in the end WORDINATOR gets killed by terminator. All of these and many more were supposed to be new names for KVocTrain. Some less serious. But the (KVoc)Train will not roll on for ever. This is a call for new name suggestions! Come up with a great new name for the new KVocTrain! Please add your favorite name for a vocabulary training program to the comments section or visit in #kde-edu!

One of the goals of Kubuntu Gutsy is to have Strigi installed by default. Unfortunately the existing panel app was a line edit embedded in kicker, which took up loads of space. So I made it into a systray applet. Read More